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From the last section of the article:
If the Artemis III landing mission moves to 2026 or later, it doesn’t make much difference whether Artemis II flies in late 2024 or 2025. There’s just no big rush. In fact, Free acknowledged on Tuesday that NASA is considering alternate mission profiles for Artemis III in case of significant delays to Starship and the Axiom spacesuits.
SpaceX first needs to get the Starship rocket into orbit. Another Starship test launch could happen in the next couple of months. Then there will need to be many more test flights, including a Starship refueling demonstration in orbit, a capability without which Starship can’t reach the Moon. Finally, SpaceX plans to fly a Starship test mission to land on the Moon without astronauts before committing to a crew landing.
Free said NASA officials recently met with SpaceX’s team at the Starship development site in South Texas. SpaceX provided NASA with an updated schedule of milestones to get to the Artemis III landing, but Free declined to discuss specifics of the timeline.
“I think we’ll look at that and update around that in the near future, after we have some time to digest it,” Free said. "But we’re holding all the contractors to that December of ’25 date (for Artemis III).
“We may end up flying a different mission,” Free said. "If we’re having these big slips, we’ve looked at can we do other missions, if the possibility exists there. Right now, we’re still taking a look at their schedule. The spacesuits are having a CDR (Critical Design Review) in October, so that’s obviously another piece of hardware that’s on the critical path for that mission.”
I don’t really see a point in flying Artemis 3 without at least going to Gateway, which won’t be ready in NRHO until probably late 2026. Plus, Artemis 4 will be NET 2028 because of EUS/ML2 development, so I don’t see what the big hurry would be for the “cadence” schedule.
I’m not trying to excuse Starship delays just because other contractors are also behind. All these delays suck. There’s just so much work to do.